Pretty picture: Dendrobium lindleyi var. majus

I'm increasingly impressed by Google's ability to figure out what species I mean when I search for a mangled name. (This one's tag: "Den lindiyl var majus.")

Granted, that's a double-edged sword, since Google also likes to torment me by correcting things that I've typed incorrectly on purpose, or correcting things that aren't even wrong, just less common than whatever it thinks I should be looking for. But even so. It's getting smarter.

Not the greatest picture, alas. So it goes.

Random plant event: Euphorbia leuconeura

The Euphorbia leuconeura story continues. When we last checked in, there were flowers starting to appear on one of the two plants. It's taken longer than I was expecting, but there are now finally some seedlings popping up:

Six so far in this pot (one has emerged since the photo was taken); I've also spotted one seedling in a neighboring plant's pot.

Not sure what, exactly, to do with these; obviously my initial impulse is to give them their own pots and begin mass-producing them, because that's always my first impulse, but A) that's going to take space, and I was already planning to start cranking out Coffea seedlings starting in December, so I really don't have the room, and B) it's kind of a stupid idea for me to be making more plants to take care of, what with the ongoing scale infestation.¹ So I guess they're going to stay where they are for the foreseeable future. Hopefully root crowding won't be too big of a problem; I suppose I'll know based on how quickly the pots dry out.

-

¹ I am now in the process of adding imidacloprid to all the plants in the house. (Last year I just did the basement, which was apparently not good enough.)
I'm doing it as I water, which means that I won't actually be done until around the end of November, and imidacloprid takes a month or two to reach full effectiveness, so I won't really know how well it worked until around late January.
And my chances aren't great, mathematically speaking. I don't know how likely it is to both fully eliminate scale from plants that are currently infested and prevent new infestations from starting on clean plants, but if it's 99.9% effective, which is optimistic, and all 936 plants are either infested or exposed, my chances of actually getting rid of the problem once and for all this winter are only (0.999)^936, or about 39%.
I can do things to help boost those odds: remove branches or leaves that have visible scale on them, throw out some more plants, wipe plants down with rubbing alcohol. And it's likely that not every plant is either infested or exposed right now. It could be that I only have to eliminate or prevent scale on like 75 plants, in which case a mere 99% success rate would give me roughly 50-50 odds of victory.
So there's some room for optimism. Just not, you know, very much.

Texts From an Anthurium

Preface: as much as I'd love to claim credit for it, I did not create this form; it belongs to Mallory Ortberg at The Toast, and she's done way better things with it than this. (I particularly recommend Text Messages From a Jack-O-Lantern, though be warned: it's sad. Texts From The Lorax is also really good, and more upbeat. They're all recommended, though.)

---------------------------------------------------------------

Hi
Im touching the top of the thing now

what thing

i dont know its solid and clear
and making me bend

plastic?

?

ill get you yr own pot soon

dont rot first ok?

its just kind of uncomfortable is all
my petiole hurts

---------------------------------------------------------------
my roots feel funny

yeah the potting mix

isn't the same as the vermiculite

i know

youll get used to it tho

its not bad exactly
just weird

well give it some time

it tastes different
i dont feel anchored properly
like i might come loose and fall

you wont fall

itll be ok

---------------------------------------------------------------
i dont know if im supposed to
talk to you abt this or what
but the soil feels dry

oh geez

sorry

i should have watered yesterday

instead of playing the sims

no worries
i think im ok
just maybe water soon ok

---------------------------------------------------------------
aaa aaa aaa aaa

what

what is it

theres something on me

what

theres something on me and
oh god
i think its eating me
do somethign pls

ill be right there

where did it come from
what is happening

its probably scale

a scale insect

ive been trying bu

theyre hard to get rid of

well hurry up
i dont like scale insects

im coming

i dont like them either

---------------------------------------------------------------
hey

hi bob

did you mean to turn out the light

i didnt turn anything off

no

cause the light above me is dark
and usually its bright
at this time of day

probably one of the bulbs burnt out

they dont last forever

or maybe the fixture went bad

sometimes they break

can i come down and fix it in like half an hr?

ok
its just darker
and im hungry

do you want me to come down right now?

i could do that

well if its not aa problem 4u
but you dont have to
RIGHT now

no its ok

ill do it now

im not doing anything important anyway

just the blog

---------------------------------------------------------------
help
theres sometihng on me again

what

more scale

no its different
it moved really fast
i dont know if its still there or not
but it was big
lots bigger

oh

was it trying to eat u

i dont think so
it just ran across
its gone now

it was probably just a spider

did you count the legs

spiders have 8

i didn't count
i was distracted

well let me know if it comes back

ok
thank you
sorry to bother you

---------------------------------------------------------------
hey
bijoux just made a funny leaf
its all red
and theres a weird dangly bit
are they ok

what like a flower

whats a flower

oh god

why is it bad
to have a flower

i dont know how to explain

its not bad

maybe kind of embarrassing

its where seeds come from

seeds like i used to be

yes

i cant believe i have to give the birds and bees talk

to a plant

what are birds and bees

actually its probably not birds and bees

for anthuriums

its probably beetles or flies or something

maybe i shoudl google that

before i try to explain

whatever
as long as i know
theyre not dying

not at all

its a good thing

it shows theyre growing up

and humans like me

think flowers are pretty

usually

so you wish i would make a flower?
are you disappointed

no no no

its not like that at all

youll bloom when you bloom

theres no pressure at all

i like leaves too

---------------------------------------------------------------
ive got a surprise for you

a happy surprise?

yes

should i come down now and look

no
not yet
its not ready yet
wait a few weeks

should i guess?

is it a flower?

maybe
youll just have to wait and see

when shouldi check

couple weeks

ok

---------------------------------------------------------------
so what did you think

about the flower?

it was nice

omg i am so horny right now
do you think theres a way i could

tmi tmi tmi

get my pollen over to bijoux
sorry
its hard to think about anything else
but was the flower nice?

yeah

tho i wondered why you went with

pinkish-red

dont know
it seemed like a nice color when bijoux did it
you dont like pinksh red?

no

i mean its a fine color

its just that most of you guys

are doing pinkish red

i was thinking thered be more variety maybe

oh

but thats not to say

its a bad color

i mean its not white

if all of you did white flowers then

that would be really boring

i can try to do something else next time

i dont think it works like that

but seriously dont worry about it

im sorry i said anything

ppink-red is great

and youre right bijoux does wear it well

and so do you for that matter

---------------------------------------------------------------
help

what

i think my flowers going to fall off
its all dry and shit

oh

is that all

what do you mean
is that all
i dont want 2 go back
2 just having leaves again

well but

having flowers si so much fun

you know you can make more flowers right?

and pollination is the
i can make more flowers?

yes

bob

you can make more flowers

most anthuriums do

oh thank goodness
if i couldnt make any more flowers
id be so depressed

a lot of plants dont bloom more than once actually

so youre kind of lucky

they just bllom and then go back to making leaves forever?
that doesnt make any sense

no

usually they bloom once
set seeds and then die

oh
yeah dying sounds abt right
i cn understand that

i wouldnt have thought blooming was

such a big deal

dont humans bloom

well sort of

but its different

but you wouldnt want to bloom once
and then die right?

no

youre right

you make a good point

now youve got me feeling bad for annuals

thats what the plants that do that are called

being an annual must be terrible

yeah maybe it is

id never really thought about it

Pretty picture: Rhyncholaeliocattleya Firey Leopard x Rhyncattleanthe Martha Clarke

The International Orchid Register says it's Firey Leopard. The tag said Fiery Leopard (and also called both parents Potinara). Google corrects Firey to Fiery. None of the flower pictures that come up in Google image search for any combination of spelling (Firey / Fiery), parents (Firey Leopard / Martha Clarke), or genus name (Potinara / Rhynchocattleya / Rhyncattleanthe) look much like this photo, so I'm inclined to believe that this photo is a shared delusion between me and my camera and never actually existed.

Your Love is Like / a Rollercoaster, Baby, Baby

Weird times. The plant collection is at once thriving in previously unprecedented ways and going completely to hell, which I guess is something that can happen once a collection reaches a certain size. Sort of like how Texas can be a disaster area due to flood and drought simultaneously.

On the one hand, I've been finding scale infestations all over the house, including on some very special plants,¹ which has at times left me despairing of ever getting things under control. (For good reason -- this has been going on for almost two years already, and only seems to be getting worse. It's showing up in new rooms, it's showing up on plants I thought I'd cured, and it's particularly bad on the plants that were outside for the summer.²) I'm not seeing scale on that many plants, really (probably only about 50, in a collection of 955), but of course it's the scale you're not seeing that's the real problem.

Also the Euphorbia fungus has returned as well. It probably never left.

On the other hand, the Stapelia giganteas are blooming like crazy, which is delightful, in that special way that the smell of dog shit can be delightful if it's being smelled for the right reasons.³

Anthurium "Bijoux Tuit" is working on a second bloom, making it the second of my Anthurium seedlings to bloom twice. Three more Anthurium seedlings are producing first blooms,⁴ for a total of thirteen. I'm not completely used to the idea of the Anthuriums blooming, even though it's been a few weeks now, so this is neat every time I'm reminded of it. About 40% of the Clivia seeds I started are producing leaves.⁵ I just took a whole bunch of berries off the Coffea and started seeds drying.⁶

Seeds on lower right.
I had one Schlumbergera seedling, #55, produce a flower bud about 14 months after it was first sown.⁷ The Spathiphyllum seedlings are looking like actual plants now, and have been for some time.

They're even suckering!

So the teal deer here is that the most incredible, wonderful, and exciting things are happening with the plant collection, and I am honestly thinking about throwing it all in the trash, shuttering the blog, and taking up a less emotionally draining hobby, like competitive jam-jar rolling.

For the time being, I've just been throwing out plants⁸ and looking for sources for bulk imidacloprid.⁹ Should I find scale on the Anthuriums again, however, absolutely anything might happen.

LATE EDIT: While watering on Tuesday night, I found out Schlumbergera number 25 has decided to try and bloom as well:

Hopefully that bud will do better than #55's did.

-

¹ The original Murraya paniculata, all four of the gray-variegated Yucca guatemalensis, and the Furcraea foetida 'Medio-Picta,' to name a few.
² Lesson learned: don't put scale-infested plants outside in the summer. I blame ants.
³ So far, I have six blooms open at once in the plant room, plus at least one on the smellier Stapelia variegata, and I'm not finding the combined odor objectionable or even noticing it much. Which might mean that I've just gotten used to it, but the husband hasn't said commented on any unusual smells, and he spends less time in the house. So I'm thinking maybe it's just really not that bad unless you're up close. They're not a flower you want to stick behind your ear or anything.
⁴ #118, "Elijah Sturdabowtit;" #46, "Aurora Boreanaz;" and #235, "Rowan DeBoate." Rowan is particularly of interest, as her spathe is sort of a pale peach/cream color, which I haven't seen before on my plants.
⁵ No, it does not seem to have mattered much whether I rinsed them with hydrogen peroxide before planting, though I can't say for certain that it doesn't matter at all. The un-peroxided group of five seeds currently stands at: 0 rotted, 3 inactive, and 2 germinated and producing foliage. The peroxided group of eight seeds has 2 rotted, 1 inactive, 2 germinated but not doing much of anything, and 3 germinated and producing foliage. If we're only counting the seedlings that are visibly growing and healthy-seeming, that's a success rate of 40% on the first group and 38% on the second.
⁶ I took one berry off on 7 October, which gave me two seeds. Then on 27 October, I removed a whole cupful, and got 138 seeds. Though at least three got washed down the drain while I was trying to clean them off, and I'm planning to give a few others away, so I'm probably going to wind up starting about 130 seeds from this batch on 22 December. And that's not even half the berries that are on the plant.
Unrelated point of interest: in large quantities, Coffea berry skins smell sort of oniony, it turns out.
⁷ No pictures, because the bud dropped. It had either already given up on further development when I took it out of the flat it was in, or I knocked it off the plant in the process of untangling it from the other seedlings, 'cause by the time I went to get the camera to take a picture, it was no longer attached to the plant. Considering that it had no business even thinking about blooming in the first place (it's in the basement, under artificial lights, so it doesn't get the long, cool nights it should require for setting buds, and it was also a couple years too young to be blooming besides, according to all the reputable websites), I figure this is a pretty good sign. The moral? Between this and the Anthurium situation, I'm thinking that it's best to ignore when people tell you that plants have to be X years old before they'll bloom, because plants can't read and will bloom when they feel like it.
⁸ I had 1017 plants at the beginning of September, 1001 at the beginning of October, and it looks like we're going to be somewhere around 950 at the beginning of November. Since most of the plants that were easy to get rid of got thrown out ages ago, every plant I discard now is like a knife to the heart, pretty much.
⁹ For comparison, I've been paying $8.50 for one pound of 0.22% imidacloprid; the stuff at the link is $3.08/lb for 0.5% imidacloprid, before shipping. Do I actually need that much in order to dose the entire collection all at once? No, probably not that much. My best ballpark guess is about 25 lb. of what I've been getting, or 11 lb. of the bulk stuff.
Some of you will, at this point, be thinking about telling me I should try something else, something other than imidacloprid, like neem oil or rubbing alcohol or whatever. The reason why I'm not considering these as options is because sprinkling imidacloprid granules on soil is fast, covers the whole plant, and only has to be done once. Spraying neem or rubbing alcohol, or anything else, takes much longer to apply, covers only the areas I can reach with the spray (not so bad for large-leaved plants like Strelitzia, but spraying every surface on a Polyscias fruticosa? Fuggedaboutit.), and has to be re-done at least every week or two to keep up with the freshly-hatched larvae. As the size of the collection decreases, rubbing alcohol or whatever might be more of an option, but at the moment, there's really no way I could keep up. It's not like I haven't tried before.

Pretty picture: Phragmipedium Noirmont

With bonus background Midwesterners!

Phragmipedium Noirmont = Phragmipedium Memoria Dick Clements x Phragmipedium longifolium

Saturday morning Sheba picture

No big Sheba news. No little Sheba news either, as far as that goes.

Unrelated: I noticed yesterday morning when I was out with Sheba that we had a volunteer Petunia in one of the beds (the one that never got weeded or watered and was full of whiteflies for the last month and a half of the summer because I am a bad outdoor gardener and because whiteflies like Cannas).

I like Petunias quite a bit, but we've never actually grown any here, or even attempted to, so this was a happy surprise. (Also a happy surprise: it color-coordinates with the blog.) We had a tiny peach poppy appear out of nowhere in early August, as well.

We might be able to explain the Papaver, as there's a chance it might have been in an old packet of "wildflower seeds" that we threw around the lawn just to see what would happen, but the Petunia is a mystery. Maybe seeds got blown through the fence from the neighbors' garden?

Grab bag

Various recent plant- and fungus-related events:

1. Stapelia gigantea

Everybody else has been posting Stapelia pictures for the last month or so, but my plants have lagged behind for some reason: everybody else was posting flowers when I was just beginning to see buds.

So far, two flowers have opened, and there are another four or five left to go. As to the smell: I can't detect any just standing in the room with them. I can if I get right up next to them and inhale, though. Experiments to determine the minimum number of Stapelia gigantea flowers it takes to be unpleasant in a plant-room-sized room are ongoing; I'll keep you informed about the results.


2. Strelitzia juncea
I've finally obtained some Strelitzia juncea seeds, after a long period of wanting some but not finding any. I began with five seeds, which I planted on 19 September, and I noticed the first sprout on 18 October, which I guess is fairly rapid progress. I'd been warned that they were irregular germinators, and could take a few months to do anything, so I guess this is encouraging.

I'm not even sure why I wanted them in the first place; the existing Strelitzias here (2 S. nicolai, 2 S. reginae) are big and awkward to deal with, and it's not clear that S. juncea can even be grown indoors in the first place. But I'm still going to try.


3. Anthuriums, assorted
The Anthurium "hookeri" spadix is not showing any sign of having self-pollinated. Which is more or less what I was expecting to happen. Or expecting to not happen, I guess. It's still attached to the plant, though, and sometimes they take a while to show any obvious changes, so I haven't entirely given up hope yet.

There are also two new additions to the list of flowering Anthurium seedlings, #26 ("Peaches Christ," whom we've seen on the blog before) and #276 ("Zach Religious"). That's eight seedlings blooming now: 26, 59, 76, 108, 238, 243, 276, and 282. In case you needed some lottery numbers to play or something.¹

Peaches' spathe is, so far, the same pink-red as "Bijoux Tuit" and most of the others, and is consequently not that interesting enough to warrant a photo, but the plant as a whole looks good even if the flower's nothing special.

Zach is possibly going to be the most interesting seedling yet; his spathe is a pale peach-pink with a red margin right now.

It's actually kind of unsettlingly close to my skin tone (below and to the left of the spathe), now that I look at the picture.
The color may change -- not only is it normal for developing spathes to get darker in color as they mature, but I'm not sure Zach's going to make it to full bloom. Some of the Anthurium seedlings do a practice inflorescence and then drop it before they make a real one in a different color,² and there are some indications that Zach might be inclined that way. (Both "Dave Trading" and "Bob Humbug" did this too; maybe it's a guy thing.) In any case, I'm potentially excited about having some variety in color.

"Sal Monella" is both in the process of unrolling the spathe from its first inflorescence and in the process of producing a second bloom. If the second bloom is successful, then Sal would be the first of the seedlings to bloom twice, which makes him potentially valuable for breeding. Also nice: the spathe has remained a solid red red, not the pinkish-red of most of the others. It's not hugely different from the other five that had bloomed previously, but it's different enough to notice and be happy about.

(New inflorescence is just starting to be visible, below and slightly to the left of the one that's opening now.)
EDIT: I finished this post Wednesday morning, then found another two flowers in progress on Wednesday afternoon: #58 ("Betty Larsony") and #245 ("Sawyer Ad"). Sawyer's spathe looks more or less in line with Gemini and most of the other seedlings; Betty might be a little lighter in color but it's hard to tell for sure. In Betty's case, I believe she's trying to apologize. So that makes ten.

And no, I'm not going to blog about it every. Single. Time. one of the Anthurium seedlings produces a flower from now until the end of eternity. But I'm excited. Bear with me.


4. Unknown mushrooms

I happened on this group a while back and found the size of the clump impressive enough to photograph. I couldn't make an ID on the species, even with the pictures to go from and my copy of The Pocket Guide to Wild Mushrooms; my best guess is something in the Hypholoma genus but I emphasize that it's a guess.

The closest match in the book was H. capnoides, but the pictures of H. capnoides that come up in Google don't look much like my pictures or those in the book. And considering that the book is explicitly about edible mushrooms, and not all mushrooms are edible, there's every chance it shouldn't contain a photo of this particular mushroom in the first place. So I probably shouldn't even be guessing at an ID in public.

Mushrooms remain neat, though, even if they aren't plants.


5. Artiocarpus heterophyllus

Finally, an oddity at the supermarket: Jackfruit.

One could buy it by weight ($10/lb, which translates to $4.50/kg) or pay $30 (reduced from $35!) and get the entire fruit. (Which suggests that the whole thing was maybe only 4 lb / 1.8 kg to begin with. It sure looked a lot heavier than that, though, so I may be making some bad assumptions.) At those prices, for a fruit I couldn't have even guessed how to begin eating, I wasn't particularly tempted, though the informational sign next to it mentioned seeds, and that got my attention briefly.

-

¹ Yes, I am aware that lottery numbers usually don't go that high, and don't usually have you pick eight numbers. But I'm not seriously suggesting that you play the lottery, so it all works out.
² It's not really practice. But that's what it looks like. (If you object to plant anthropomorphization, what are you even doing here in the first place?)